Shorts Program: Imagining a New Future

This is a featured presentation of our Imagining a New Future program area.

Adeline, The Great
Director: Jessica Mendez Siqueiros
Narrative Short, 2019 [USA] English, 12 minutes
A woke boarding school student questions her commitment to activism when she finds herself with no friends, countless enemies and facing some very serious accusations that threaten to get her expelled.

Kama’āina (Child of the Land)
Director and Writer: Kimi Howl Lee
Narrative Short, 2020 [USA] English, 17 minutes
A queer sixteen-year-old girl, Mahina, must navigate life on the streets in Oahu, until she eventually finds refuge at the Pu’uhonua o Wai’anae––Hawaiʻi’s largest organized homeless encampment.

Mizuko (Water Child)
Directors: Kira Dane & Katelyn Rebelo
Documentary Short, 2019 [USA] English, Japanese, 15 minutes
In Japan there is a special way to grieve abortions. ‘Mizuko kuyo’ meaning ‘water child memorial’ allows people to metaphorically return their unborn children to the sea. Inspired by this Buddhist ritual, the Japanese-American filmmaker confronts her own experience of abortion in the US.

Basta (Enough) {East Coast Premiere}
Directors: Cecilia Albertini & Lesley Elizondo
Documentary Short, 2020 [USA] English, Spanish 12 minutes
Veronica was a 24 year old immigrant from El Salvador when she was sexually assaulted while working as a night janitor in Los Angeles. Thanks to her resilience and strength, she did not stay silent and helped creat a grassroots movement to change the janitorial industry and fight its normalization of sexual abuse in the workplace.

SOULS
Director and Writer: Malakai
Narrative Short, 2019 [USA] English, 17 minutes
Unable to deal with her grandmother’s declining mental and physical health, a young girl uses her cardboard spaceship to escape her reality before the matriarch of her family dies.

Lupita
Director: Monica Wise Robles
Documentary Short, 2020 [Mexico, USA] Spanish, 21 minutes
In a country where indigenous people are increasingly displaced, their land stolen, where students disappear without trace following police arrest, and journalists are murdered at an alarming rate, a courageous new voice emerges. Lupita, a Tsostil Maya massacre survivor, at the forefront of a new movement of indigenous women.